The Inside View: Native Response to Contemporary, Indian English Novel (Hardbound - 2003)

The present volume includes critical and insightful essays on ‘Native Responses’ to contemporary Indian English Novel. Nativism as an ideology cannot be accepted in toto in the Indian context, as there are several paradoxical and self-contradictory factors operating within the Indian social structure. The Nativist approach to Indian English literature cannot be an effective device to assess the genre. To be carried away by the waves of the Western thought would also be equally ridiculous. Therefore, to understand the not so new phenomenon now, dispassionate and objective criteria has to be evolved. The essays in this volume endeavour to reach out to the Indian English novel with as much objective understanding of the discipline as necessary. The title of the book indicates ‘Native Responses,’ not ‘Nativist,’ because there is no theory involved, or any permanent set of values to be adopted for evaluating Indian English Novel. Nevertheless, the essays included in the volume are meant to clear the web of misunderstanding created by Nativism and Cosmopolitanism together and find a way out to better understanding and appreciation of Contemporary Indian English Novel.

It is hoped that the volume will be of immense use to the common reader as well as to the serious critics of Contemporary Indian English Novel.

Dr. Rangrao J. Bhongle is Professor and Head of the Department of English, Mumbai University, Mumbai. Dr. Bhongle is a bilingual creative writer and has published Poetry, Fiction and Criticism in Marathi—his native tongue, as well as in English. He has won awards for his book of criticism (1989) and for collection of poems in Marathi (1993). His collection of poems in English The Moon at the Window (1999) was highly appreciated by the press and by the readers of poetry. Dr. Bhongle’s other books include Revelations: Essays on English Poetry (1995) and Contemporary American Literature (ed.), (2000).

Dr. Bhongle currently edits Indian Literary Panorama, a journal dedicated to contemporary Indian literature and society.